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Full Tilt Boogie (Sarah Kelly, 1997) Review

By Jason Lees, MoreHorror.com

To continue on with my recent ‘behind the scenes’ fascination, I’ve been digging up what I think are the best documentaries hidden on the special features menus across the dvd world. Most of what you’ll find in those supplements are the Electronic Press Kit docus that are there to fluff up the release and add content. Basically you get a fifteen minute HBO Making Of… special that is more about inflating egos than getting into what really happens on the set. When you do find a little film out there that goes a little further, damn it, we have to embrace it.

Instead of showcasing the film’s stars, FULL TILT BOOGIE follows the assistants and the crew, and while that might not make this the most Hollywood of pieces, it definitely makes for an eye opening flick. It’s not normal that a flick of this level gets this kind of scrutiny, but I just wish this had caught on. I’d have loved to have had this be the norm for promoting indie horror flicks. Can you imagine if all our favorite films of the DVD era had been blessed with a full film crew haunting their sets? Sure, we have some good ones out there (“30 Days in Hell” on Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS comes to mind) but they’re few and far between.

FULL TILT BOOGIE is that rare doc hidden on the special feature that could actually stand on its own. You can watch Kelly’s film and not have the feature be spoiled.

It’s a shame that something as good as Sarah Kelly’s FULL TILT BOOGIE isn’t on every release of Robert Rodriguez’s FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. Kelly’s movie is an exhaustive ‘fly on the wall’ account of all the backstage crew on that little indie horror flick we all know and love. If you do upgrade your copy of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN to BluRay, don’t pitch your old copy with the better documentary. And if your old copy is that bare bones disc, treat yourself to a few minutes on Amazon and dig up the Collector’s DVD that includes FULL TILT BOOGIE. As much as I dig Rodriguez’s vampire neo-classic, I bet I’ve watched this docu more times.